Resupply and casualty evacuation (CASEVAC) under hazardous field conditions often results in casualties, in terms of those both on the ground and in the air. Establishing an infrastructure to facilitate CASEVAC, however, is generally impractical in the field. Therefore, a number of developments have been pursued to facilitate package delivery in such austere conditions, which are common to a variety of mission sets, such as humanitarian relief operations, noncombatant evacuations, routine cargo resupply, underway replenishment, irregular warfare, and sustained conventional combat.
One method of package delivery is a precision airdrop, which involves dropping a package from an aircraft to the ground. The Joint Precision Airdrop (JPAD) system, for example, endeavors to deliver a package to a designated waypoint. The JPAD system, however, must first be programmed before it is loaded onto the aircraft, and once it is deployed, it uses GPS data to form a glide path to the waypoint. The JPAD system can take airspeed data and adjust itself in flight and terrain data to avoid obstacles that would otherwise cause the drop to crash or miss its waypoint. Another method is to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to deliver the package to the waypoint. Each of these methods, however, requires an unobstructed flight path to the waypoint, which typically requires that the waypoint be in an open area free of obstructions (e.g., trees, mountains, etc.). Such open areas, however, expose personnel on the ground to unwanted attention and harm when gathering the package from the aircraft. Therefore, delivery to a covered location provides enhanced safety to the ground personnel.
In lieu of aircraft, Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) may be used to port the package to a destination. In practice, these UGVs can be navigated, using a remote control, to a covered location from the covered location by a human. UGVs, however, are limited in that a ground path must be available for the UGV to navigate to a waypoint. For example, obstacles (e.g., streams, ravines, buildings, etc.) can prohibit access of the UGV to the waypoint. Accordingly, while UGVs are more agile on the ground, UGVs are not well-suited for long distance travel to a waypoint, which is a benefit an aircraft. Moreover, UGVs suffer from a limited view beyond its immediate surroundings, which introduces additional navigational challenges. Therefore, a need exists for systems and methods for enabling unmanned and optionally-manned cargo delivery to personnel on the ground.